Free Great Historical Novels by Fay Weldon Page A

protest.
    She stepped up into the coach. In a moment it was rumbling down the drive towards the Dublin road.

30 November 1840
 
Mamo stór,
The Irish Mail has arrived in Holyhead without sinking. I was so bilious until this morning that I didn’t once consider the fate of the Spanish Armada. Manannán’s kingdom is in ceaseless motion and I cannot imagine how sailors ever manage to walk upright.
There is little to see of England on a November evening but fog and a barrow-seller or two, but there is thankfully a tavern on the quay, from where I write this. It feels a little bold, venturing into a tavern on my own, but as I have crossed the sea, what is there to fear in a port tavern? So far no one has either approached or reproached me.
The window is grimy with sea mist and soot, but I can just see a row of black hansoms beneath a gas lantern, waiting to drive passengers to the overnight rail service to Euston. It departs at midnight and it is barely ten o’clock. I am told the railway is nearby and, since I don’t want to encounter certain passengers from the crossing, I am taking comfort in a glass of porter and a slice of cold, rather greasy, pigeon pie.
At lunch today (besides the pie, the only meal I’ve eaten since I left) I shared a table with a party of London ladies who had been in Dublin for a Protestant wedding. I was seated beside Mrs Spufford, who informed me that travelling unchaperoned is a terrible thing for the reputation of a young woman, and that I must endeavour to learn certain proprieties if I expect to be welcomed into polite society. If she is an envoy of the la-di-da league (that’s what Thomas calls them) then English society isn’t so polite after all.
 
Manannán took revenge on my behalf. Mrs Spufford dipped her spoon into her minted pea soup just as the boat tilted, causing both ladies and bowls to slide sideways. The contents of the spoon landed in her décolletage and I laughed before I could help it. No one else did. Mrs Spufford looked at me as though I were something sticking to the sole of her slipper. Presumably, a well-bred young Englishwomen would have found no humour in a pea green décolletage. Mrs Spufford and I did not speak again and the other London ladies took the opportunity to practise their repartee, which still stings my vanity.
‘ You are from the trade, Miss Mahoney? Why, my upstairs maid comes from a linen family. ’
‘ Ireland really is becoming civilised, I had no idea I would be able to buy silk stockings in Dublin!’
They droned on with their pretty spite, and I let them. I simply could not be bothered wasting my wits on the creatures, besides I’m weak and weary from being rolled around like a brewer’s tun. I thought they’d forgotten me by the time the custard pudding was served, but their best insult was yet to come.
‘ How fortunate you are, Miss Mahoney, that your complexion is so dark. It is tiresome being fashionable at times; always taking care to protect one’s delicate pigmentation. ’
I entertained myself by imagining their coils of lacquered hair as the stubs of Lucifer’s horns. I am beginning to wonder if being Irish and therefore Catholic might be a disadvantage in London. Of course, you know I’m no Catholic, but that is our secret. I was curious to know what English ladies liked to talk about. Now I know: breeding, and the allowances of people one aspires to know; idle people who pass their time redecorating their homes andthemselves. I cannot imagine the conventions and niceties I am ignorant of. I hope Antonia Quaker is no minion of polite society.
I can see the contents of the hold of the Mail being transferred to wagons; but there seem to be more sacks of grain than of mail. It looks as if I have just crossed the Irish Sea with all of the wheat, oats and barley of the nation. It is not just Irish linen that is channelled through London. Perhaps I should be grateful that British law has not actually forbidden women to read the